Embodiments of the present invention relate to an automated test equipment and an instruction provider for providing a sequence of instructions. Further embodiments of the present invention relate to a method for providing a signal to a device under test and a method for providing a sequence of instructions. Further embodiments of the present invention relate to a test system comprising such automated test equipment and instruction provider.
In conventional test systems the number of drive (receive/tristate edges in a test vector which are associated with a test vector are fixed. Such an association of signal edges to a vector achieves two things: a higher throughput at the same clock frequency and a compression of data. Also, in the application such number of edges in a vector is fixed for a pattern, dictated by a requirements such as throughput, stability, signal integrity, etc.
The fixed nature of such edges in a vector creates different problems, especially for protocol type patterns when the natural boundary of a protocol does not fit to the selected number of edges in a vector (also called xmode) properly. In this case the assembly of different packets becomes difficult, as the pattern generator either has to add unnecessitated nop( ) type operation (so-called padding) or to perform time expensive operations to merge consecutive operation packets.
Furthermore, interactive modifications (e.g. during a Debug) on a compiled pattern is slow because the system has to reassemble the whole pattern or the user has to insert useless vectors to meet the vector boundary. Furthermore, pre-execution modification (such as SMT8 bind time) is also difficult.